Social Media

Now You Can Add Interactive Images to Your Tweets

Twitter introduced Cards this summer, enabling media publishers to include quick synopses and article photos in tweets, and allowing the rest of us to view linked pictures and videos without leaving Twitter at all.

But that experience just gained a lot more potential on Monday with the added ability to include interactive images powered by ThingLink in tweets.

If you're not familiar, ThingLink enables users — you, me, big national brands — to spruce up images with several links to other pieces of digital content. Icons pop up when users hover over the image then, with a click, open up YouTube channels, audio clips, Facebook or Pinterest profiles, home pages, contact forms or anything else you would normally be able to link to the old-fashioned way. Check out this tweet by country music artist Joy Collins for a hands-on example.

That ability to include one jumping off point for a range of online destinations from Twitter itself has the potential to be pretty huge, especially for brands and marketers.

Let's use an NBA team, for example. Teams frequently share photos on Twitter. But imagine if a rich, stunning image from last night's game included a link to a box score from the game and another to a YouTube video of top plays. Then imagine that it also included links to social accounts on Facebook, Pinterest and other networks. Finally, imagine that same photo including links to the team's apparel store and a page to buy tickets for the next home game.

That single photo, in essence, just became a platform of its own.

Traditional images, video and other content certainly won't fade away, but don't be surprised to see ThingLink images become a mainstay on Twitter as brands begin to experiment and get more comfortable with the options it provides.

What kind of potential (or lack thereof) do you think ThingLink has with Twitter? Give us your take in the comments.

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